To facilitate the development of Internet of Things (IoT) services, tremendous IoT devices are deployed in the wireless network to collect and pass data to the server for further processing. Aiming at improving the data sensing and delivering efficiency, the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technique has been proposed to design dual-functional signals for both radar sensing and data communication. To accelerate the data processing, the function computation via signal transmission is enabled by over-the-air computation (AirComp), which is based on the analog-wave addition property in a multi-access channel. As a natural combination, the emerging technology namely over-the-air integrated sensing, communication, and computation (Air-ISCC) adopts both the promising performances of ISAC and AirComp to improve the spectrum efficiency and reduce latency by enabling simultaneous sensing, communication, and computation. In this article, we provide a promptly overview of Air-ISCC by introducing the fundamentals, discussing the advanced techniques, and identifying the applications.
As a revolution in networking, Internet of Things (IoT) aims at automating the operations of our societies by connecting and leveraging an enormous number of distributed devices (e.g., sensors and actuators). One design challenge is efficient wireless data aggregation (WDA) over tremendous IoT devices. This can enable a series of IoT applications ranging from latency-sensitive high-mobility sensing to data-intensive distributed machine learning. Over-the-air (functional) computation (AirComp) has emerged to be a promising solution that merges computing and communication by exploiting analogwav…
In this paper, we investigate the issue of integrated sensing, computation and communication (SCC) in beyond fifth-generation (B5G) cellular internet of things (IoT) networks. According to the characteristics of B5G cellular IoT, a comprehensive design framework integrating SCC is put forward for massive IoT. For sensing, highly accurate sensed information at IoT devices are sent to the base station (BS) by using non-orthogonal communication over wireless multiple access channels. Meanwhile, for computation, a novel technique, namely over-the-air computation (AirComp), is adopted to substantia…
Recent study has shown that compressive sensing (CS) based computationally secure scheme using Gaussian or Binomial sensing matrix in resource-constrained IoT devices is vulnerable to ciphertext-only attack. Although the CS-based perfectly secure scheme has no such vulnerabilities, the practical realization of the perfectly secure scheme is challenging, because it requires an additional secure channel to transmit the measurement norm. In this paper, we devise a practical realization of a perfectly secure scheme by concealing energy in which the requirement of an additional secure channel is re…
In this paper, we investigate optimal scheme to manage time scheduling of different modules including spectrum sensing, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (RFH) and ambient backscatter communication (ABCom) by maximizing data transmission rate in the internet of things (IoT). We first consider using spectrum sensing with energy detection techniques to detect high power ambient RF signals, and then performing RFH and ABCom with them. Specifically, to improve the spectrum sensing efficiency, compressive sensing is used to detect the wideband RF singals. We propose a joint optimization proble…
UAV-based base station (UBS) has played an important role in the air-ground integration network due to its high flexibility and nice air-ground wireless channels. Especially in Internet of Things (IoT) services, UBS can provide an efficient way for data collection from the IoT devices. However, due to the continuous mobility of UBS, the communication durations of devices in different locations with the UBS are not only time-limited, but also vary from each other. Therefore, it is a challenging task to analyze the throughput performance of the UAV-based IoT network. Accordingly, in this paper, …
Wireless data aggregation (WDA), referring to aggregating data distributed at devices (e.g., sensors and smartphone), is a common operation in 5G-and-beyond machine-type communications to support Internet-of-Things (IoT), which lays the foundation for diversified applications such as distributed sensing, learning, and control. Conventional WDA techniques that are designed based on a separated-communication-and-computation principle encounter difficulty in accommodating the massive access under the limited radio resource and stringent latency constraints imposed by emerging applications (e.g, a…
Constant Modulus Waveforms for IoT-Centric Integrated Sensing and Communications
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Victoria University of Wellington（惠灵顿维多利亚大学）；RakFort；IIITD（印度信息与技术研究所德里分校）；InterDigital Europe Ltd（InterDigital欧洲有限公司）；Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH（华为技术杜塞尔多夫有限公司）
One basic operation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks is aggregating distributed sensing-data over wireless-channels for function-computation, called wireless-data-aggregation (WDA). Targeting dense sensors, a recently developed technology called over-the-air computing (AirComp) can dramatically reduce the WDA latency by aggregating distributed data "over-the-air" using the waveform-superposition property of a multi-access channel. In this work, we design multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) AirComp for computing a vector-valued function in a clustered IoT network with multi-antenna sensor…
This paper advocates the use of the distributed compressed sensing (DCS) paradigm to deploy energy harvesting (EH) Internet of Thing (IoT) devices for energy self-sustainability. We consider networks with signal/energy models that capture the fact that both the collected signals and the harvested energy of different devices can exhibit correlation. We provide theoretical analysis on the performance of both the classical compressive sensing (CS) approach and the proposed distributed CS (DCS)-based approach to data acquisition for EH IoT. Moreover, we perform an in-depth comparison of the propos…
Sparse representation can efficiently model signals in different applications to facilitate processing. In this article, we will discuss various applications of sparse representation in wireless communications, with focus on the most recent compressive sensing (CS) enabled approaches. With the help of the sparsity property, CS is able to enhance the spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency for the fifth generation (5G) networks and Internet of Things (IoT) networks. This article starts from a comprehensive overview of CS principles and different sparse domains potentially used in 5G and IoT n…
Edge nodes (ENs) in Internet of Things commonly serve as gateways to cache sensing data while providing accessing services for data consumers. This paper considers multiple ENs that cache sensing data under the coordination of the cloud. Particularly, each EN can fetch content generated by sensors within its coverage, which can be uploaded to the cloud via fronthaul and then be delivered to other ENs beyond the communication range. However, sensing data are usually transient with time whereas frequent cache updates could lead to considerable energy consumption at sensors and fronthaul traffic …
In this paper, for efficient data collection with limited bandwidth, data-aided sensing is applied to Gaussian process regression that is used to learn data sets collected from sensors in Internet-of-Things systems. We focus on the interpolation of sensors' measurements from a small number of measurements uploaded by a fraction of sensors using Gaussian process regression with data-aided sensing. Thanks to active sensor selection, it is shown that Gaussian process regression with data-aided sensing can provide a good estimate of a complete data set compared to that with random selection. With …
We present a novel method for centralized collaborative spectrum sensing for IoT network leveraging cognitive radio network. Based on an online learning framework, we propose an algorithm to efficiently combine the individual sensing results based on the past performance of each detector. Additionally, we show how to utilize the learned normalized weights as a proxy metric of detection accuracy and selectively enable the sensing at detectors. Our results show improved performance in terms of inter-user collision and misdetection. Further, by selectively enabling some of the devices in the netw…
Massive machine-type communications (mMTC) are poised to provide ubiquitous connectivity for billions of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. However, the required low-latency massive access necessitates a paradigm shift in the design of random access schemes, which invokes a need of efficient joint activity and data detection (JADD) algorithms. By exploiting the feature of sporadic traffic in massive access, a beacon-aided slotted grant-free massive access solution is proposed. Specifically, we spread the uplink access signals in multiple subcarriers with pre-equalization processing and formulat…
Sensing is envisioned as a key network function of the 6G mobile networks. Artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered sensing fuses features of multiple sensing views from devices distributed in edge networks for the edge server to perform accurate inference. This process, known as multi-view pooling, creates a communication bottleneck due to multi-access by many devices. To alleviate this issue, we propose a task-oriented simultaneous access scheme for distributed sensing called Over-the-Air Pooling (AirPooling). The existing Over-the-Air Computing (AirComp) technique can be directly applied to e…
We consider an Internet-of-Things (IoT) system in which an energy harvesting powered sensor node monitors the phenomenon of interest and transmits its observations to a remote monitor over a Gaussian channel. We measure the timeliness of the signals recovered by the monitor using age of information (AoI), which could be reduced by transmitting more observations to the monitor. We evaluate the corresponding distortion with the mean-squared error (MSE) metric, which would be reduced if a larger transmit power and a larger source coding rate were used. Since the energy harvested by the sensor nod…
In future Internet-of-Things networks, sensors or even access points can be mounted on ground/aerial vehicles for smart-city surveillance or environment monitoring. To support the high-mobility sensing with low network latency, a technique called over-the-air-computation (AirComp) was recently developed which enables an access-point to receive a desired function of sensing-data from concurrent-transmissions by exploiting the superposition property of a multi-access-channel. This work aims at further developing AirComp for next-generation multi-antenna multi-modal sensor networks. Specifically,…
In this paper, we consider fast wireless data aggregation via over-the-air computation (AirComp) in Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where an access point (AP) with multiple antennas aim to recover the arithmetic mean of sensory data from multiple IoT devices. To minimize the estimation distortion, we formulate a mean-squared-error (MSE) minimization problem that involves the joint optimization of the transmit scalars at the IoT devices as well as the denoising factor and the receive beamforming vector at the AP. To this end, we derive the transmit scalars and the denoising factor in closed-…
Since there are a number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications that need to collect data sets from a large number of sensors or devices in real-time, sensing and communication need to be integrated for efficient uploading from devices. In this paper, we introduce the notion of data-aided sensing (DAS) where a base station (BS) utilizes a subset of data that is already uploaded and available to select the next device for efficient data collection or sensing. Thus, using DAS, certain tasks in IoT applications, including federated learning, can be completed by uploading from a small number of …
In most Internet of Things (IoT) networks, edge nodes are commonly used as to relays to cache sensing data generated by IoT sensors as well as provide communication services for data consumers. However, a critical issue of IoT sensing is that data are usually transient, which necessitates temporal updates of caching content items while frequent cache updates could lead to considerable energy cost and challenge the lifetime of IoT sensors. To address this issue, we adopt the Age of Information (AoI) to quantify data freshness and propose an online cache update scheme to obtain an effective trad…
To efficiently support the real-time control applications, networked control systems operating with ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLCs) become fundamental technology for future Internet of things (IoT). However, the design of control, sensing and communications is generally isolated at present. In this paper, we propose the joint optimization of control cost and energy consumption for a centralized wireless networked control system. Specifically, with the ``sensing-then-control'' protocol, we first develop an optimization framework which jointly takes control, sensing and co…
To support the unprecedented growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, tremendous data need to be collected by the IoT devices and delivered to the server for further computation. By utilizing the same signals for both radar sensing and data communication, the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technique has broken the barriers between data collection and delivery in the physical layer. By exploiting the analog-wave addition in a multi-access channel, over-the-air computation (AirComp) enables function computation via transmissions in the physical layer. The promising perfo…
In this paper, we design the multi-class privacy$\text{-}$preserving cloud computing scheme (MPCC) leveraging compressive sensing for compact sensor data representation and secrecy for data encryption. The proposed scheme achieves two-class secrecy, one for superuser who can retrieve the exact sensor data, and the other for semi-authorized user who is only able to obtain the statistical data such as mean, variance, etc. MPCC scheme allows computationally expensive sparse signal recovery to be performed at cloud without compromising the confidentiality of data to the cloud service providers. In…
A fundamental challenge of the large-scale Internet-of-Things lies in how to support massive machine-type communications (mMTC). This letter proposes a media modulation based mMTC solution for increasing the throughput, where a massive multi-input multi-output based base station (BS) is used for enhancing the detection performance. For such a mMTC scenario, the reliable active device detection and data decoding pose a serious challenge. By leveraging the sparsity of the uplink access signals of mMTC received at the BS, a compressive sensing based massive access solution is proposed for tacklin…
Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation for Over-the-Air Federated Edge Learning
School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（信息科学与技术学院，上海科技大学）；College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University（电子与信息工程学院，深圳大学）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（信息与通信工程学院，北京邮电大学）；School of Science a（科学学院）
Over-the-air computation (AirComp) shows great promise to support fast data fusion in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. AirComp typically computes desired functions of distributed sensing data by exploiting superposed data transmission in multiple access channels. To overcome its reliance on channel station information (CSI), this work proposes a novel blind over-the-air computation (BlairComp) without requiring CSI access, particularly for low complexity and low latency IoT networks. To solve the resulting non-convex optimization problem without the initialization dependency exhibited by the…
Over-the-air computation (AirComp) is a disruptive technique for fast wireless data aggregation in Internet of Things (IoT) networks via exploiting the waveform superposition property of multiple-access channels. However, the performance of AirComp is bottlenecked by the worst channel condition among all links between the IoT devices and the access point. In this paper, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted AirComp system is proposed to boost the received signal power and thus mitigate the performance bottleneck by reconfiguring the propagation channels. With an objective to mini…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has recently become a prevailing technique to alleviate the intensive computation burden in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, the limited device battery capacity and stringent spectrum resource significantly restrict the data processing performance of MEC-enabled IoT networks. To address the two performance limitations, we consider in this paper an MEC-enabled IoT system with an energy harvesting (EH) wireless device (WD) which opportunistically accesses the licensed spectrum of an overlaid primary communication link for task offloading. We aim to maximize…
The sixth-generation (6G) network is envisioned to integrate communication and sensing functions, so as to improve the spectrum efficiency (SE) and support explosive novel applications. Although the similarities of wireless communication and radio sensing lay the foundation for their combination, there is still considerable incompatible interest between them. To simultaneously guarantee the communication capacity and the sensing accuracy, the multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) technique plays an important role due to its unique capability of spatial beamforming and waveform shaping. How…
